The new year is when many of us think about how we’d like our lives to be better. Where do you want to be headed? Someone out there is most likely living your ideal cam life — and if they can do it, so can you. The question is how to get there.

We’re told all the time we need to set goals for ourselves, but very few of us are taught how to do it well. Today, let’s break down the basics of the goal setting—and goal achieving—process, with the aim of making camming the very best job it can be.

Formulate Your Goals

The first step is to determine where you want to go. Here’s your opportunity to dream big, and this can be fun. Sit down with a piece of paper, and write down what your ultimate plans are. It’s fine to think about 2018 or several years into the future.

How do you measure your success? In emotional satisfaction, such as feeling powerful, proud, creative, energized, recognized and rewarded? Through numbers, like the size of your fan base or monthly earnings? By competence and efficiency, presiding over a smoothly running cam empire, where your efforts more than pay off? You can use words and phrases, pictures and drawings, snippets of songs—whatever inspires you.

With that big picture in mind, the next step is to translate that endpoint into a clearly articulated goal that’s a stretch, but not out of reach. It’s important to set ambitions that are both challenging and realistic—too hard, and we set ourselves up to fail. Too easy, and there’s no sense of accomplishment when we do achieve it.

Target numbers are helpful, but there are many ways to think about success. Twitter followers matter less than your paycheck. Earning a hundred dollars a day might not be worth it if it requires working a hundred hours a week.

My suggestion for writing out your target goal is to include a milestone, a timeframe, and an aspirational mindset. For example: “My goal by December 31, 2018 is to earn $2,500 a month camming 20 hours a week and feel confident and in control of my finances.”

Map Out a Path

In order to reach your destination, you need a roadmap to get there. The next steps are to:

Set a schedule. Mark out on your calendar the necessary tasks to achieve your goal.

Make to-do lists. Articulating all the small steps required to reach your big dream helps make the project more manageable, and crossing completed items off your list is gratifying.

Tell other people. Explaining your aims makes them more real. Let the people who love you support you on your path.

Visualize the process and the end success.

Commit

Executing your plan is where success and failure are made. Commit to working towards your goals every day, or at the very least, on a regular schedule. If you miss a day, that’s okay—no one’s perfect. Make a note of it, and factor that information into the plans you make tomorrow.

Some self-care advice to keep in mind: Setbacks are just learning experiences. Also, no one but you can know when to persevere through the hard times and when to revise your goals to something more manageable. Don’t beat yourself up when you fall short or lose sight of the finish line—if this stuff were easy, you’d have done it by now.

Celebrate

Celebrating ourselves doesn’t come easy for many of us. Many of us never make the time to stop and honor our successes. There can be lots of reasons for this. We may have been brought up to think we don’t deserve anything extra for just doing our jobs or that commemorating our achievements is the same as bragging .

That way of thinking does us a serious disservice for a couple of reasons. Reward for a job well done is how we train our brains to develop good habits. Also, if we never allow ourselves any pleasure out of success, hard work feels like drudgery, without any end point or purpose.

Camming, like most other sex work, is rarely celebrated, but we know the good we bring to the world. When you achieve a major milestone, throw yourself a party, book yourself a spa day, buy yourself that little somethin’-somethin.’ That’s what it means when you say: You’ve earned it.

Until next time, be sweet to yourself.

Lola D.

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Lola Davina is a longtime veteran of the sex industry and author of Thriving in Sex Work: Heartfelt Advice for Staying Sane in the Sex Industry, a self-help book for sex workersnow available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iTunes and wherever else ebooks are sold. Contact her at Lola.Davina@ynotcam.com and visit her on Twitter at @Lola_Davina, on Facebook and on Tumblr.